Dead Flowers

Well when you're sittin back, in your rose pink Cadillac
Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day,
I'll be in my basement room, with a needle and a spoon.
And another girl to take my pain away
-Jagger/Richards

Japanese avant-garde: Boredoms

07.07.07: Boredoms free show at Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York called 77Boadrums.

Boredoms played with 74 other drummers from bands like of Modest Mouse, Gang Gang Dance, Unwound, and many, many more.

"It was a beautiful, hot-and-sunny summer afternoon, and Dumbo was lousy with hipsters and hippies, rollers and stoners and euphoria seekers and experimental music heads, friendly faces and free-show freaks, the sweaty, the scenesters, the nearly-naked, the curious, and me, all of us willing to stand for hours among the warehouses and cobblestones on the longest line of year* for a chance to hear what it would sound like if 77 drummers played 77 drum kits for 77 minutes on 7.7.twenty-oh-7."

Unlike many drum circles, this drum spiral had a clear hierarchy. Along with the four Boredoms, there were drum leaders, including Hisham Bharoocha (the musical director of this temporary troupe), Brian Chippendale (from Lightning Bolt) and Kid Millions (from Oneida). The full group didn’t practice until Saturday, which meant complicated synchronization was out of the question. The batterers followed the leaders, bashing out simple rhythms while Eye used his guitar necks and electronics to push the music toward a series of climaxes.

On a good day, it's about a four hour drive from Baltimore to Brooklyn, and a soundtrack of James Brown's Star Time box set seemed like the perfect prelude to 77 Boadrum. Brown's endless, yelping variations on "give the drummer some" felt like prep work for absorbing the spectacle of 77 drummers, whatever they might end up playing. And "spectacle" proved an insufficient noun, with the nearly two hour performance that mystically celebrated 7/7/07 quickly becoming the stuff of dropped jaws, stolen breath, and "damn, you shoulda been there" urban legend.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Come to Daddy

Last post was about The Dillinger Escape Plan and their fantastic EP called Irony is a Dead Scene. The EP has a pretty good cover of Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy. I thought I should now write about the original thing.

In 1997, the year Come to Daddy EP came out, I was totally clueless about many groundbreaking British electronic outfits of the 90’s (heh, barring Prodigy, and the trip-hop bunch, if you can call them electro). I first encountered Aphex Twin around the start of this decade. Went back to this EP yesterday and wondered how this sort of music existed in the pop-culture vacuum that was the "backstreet boys era”.

The man who always supported Richard D. James (the man behind Aphex Twin) was none other than John Peel.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Can-Complete Peel Sessions 1973-75

Talk of Krautrock and hell, you have to talk once again about John Peel.

“Krautrock, also known as kosmischemusik, is a generic name for the experimental music that appeared in Germany in the late 1960s and gained popularity throughout the 1970s. It is based on the ethnic slur "Kraut", which refers to "a German person" (derived from the name of the pickled cabbage dish sauerkraut, often attributed to Germany), and was coined by the music press in Great Britain, where "Krautrock" found an early and enthusiastic underground following. BBC DJ John Peel in particular is largely credited with spreading the reputation of krautrock outside of the German-speaking world.”-Wikipedia

Can’s status as musical pioneers is very well documented. And I have written enough about John Peel. You mix Can and John Peel, you get stunning music. Can did four sessions for Peel between 1973 and 1975.Tracklisting:1.Up The Bakerloo Line With Anne2.Return To BB City3.Tape Kebab4.Tony Wanna Go5.Geheim (Half Past One)6.Mighty Girl

Stand out track-"Up The Bakerloo Line With Anne". Damo Suzuki sings in a language only he can understand, but any damn person can enjoy.

Michelangelo Antonioni

July 30, 2007....What a day

Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkens back to a time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films spurred long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by camera-wielding cinephiles demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage................New York Times